“Innate Generosity.”
“One hot August afternoon a gentleman, whose name attached to a check would be more valuable to the reader than if written here, was standing in front of the Revere House, waiting for a Washington Street car. He was a slim, venerable gentleman, with long white hair, and a certain dignity about him which we suppose comes of always having a handsome balance in the bank, for we never knew a poor man to have this particular air. It was a sultry afternoon, and the millionaire, standing on the curb-stone in the shade, had removed his hat, and was cooling his forehead with his handkerchief, like any common person, when the Cambridge horse-car stopped at the crossing at his feet. From this car hastily descended a well-known man of letters, whose pre-occupied expression showed at once that he was wrestling with an insubordinate hexameter, or laying out the points of a new lecture. Suddenly he found himself face to face with a white-haired old man, dejectedly holding a hat in one hand. As quick as thought the poet—to whom neither old age nor young appeals in vain—thrust his hand into his vest pocket, and, dropping a handful of nickel and fractional currency into the extended hat, passed on. The millionaire gazed aghast into the hat for an instant, and then inverted it spasmodically, allowing the money to drop into the gutter, much to the amusement of a gentleman and a tooth-pick on the steps of the Revere House, and very much more to the amusement of another party, who chanced to know that the supposed mendicant and the man of letters had been on terms of personal intimacy these twenty years.”
A Curb-stone Money-maniac.
A man may possess large acquisitiveness and benevolence at the same time, like Sir Astley Cooper, and succeed both pecuniarily and professionally. Such are, however, scarce. Those with an excess of the grasping principle in their composition illustrate the truth that “where the treasure is the heart will be also.” Asleep or awake, drunk or sober, such men never lose sight of the almighty dollar. The annexed story, though irreverent to the doctors, is not irrelevant to the case:—
During the late “panic,” a fellow, whose prominent feature was in his Jewish nose, which presented the sign of acquisitiveness by the bridge widening on to the cheeks above the alæ,—all men noted for accumulating have this sign, hung out by nature as a warning to the unwary,—was making a great noise, as he clung to a friendly lamp-post, to which he was arguing the state of the money market. “Come, sir, you are making too much noise,” said a policeman.
CAPTURE OF A WALL STREET BULL.
“Me? No, ’tain’t me that’s—hic—making the noise; it’s the bulls—the bulls, sir; them’s what’s making all the noise,” replied the fellow, skewing first one side of the post, then the other, trying to get a view of his new intruder.
“You are tight, sir—tight as a peep,” continued the watchman.
“Me tight? No, sir; it’s the money-market what’s—ti—tight,” replied the gentlemanly dressed individual, though much the worse for bad whiskey. “Go down Wall Street, and Fisk and Vanderbuilt—all of ’em—will tell you so. Everybody says money is—hic—tight. I never was more loose in my—hic—life;” and he demonstrated the assertion by swinging very loosely around the lamp-post, and falling down.